Promotions are marketing and advertising tools used to promote products and/or services. Promotions are typically employed to increase sales and/or consumer traffic. Promotions are often used to drive traffic to “brick and mortar” stores. Promotions may include coupons to obtain discounts on certain products, such as a percentage discount or “buy-one”-type discounts. One assumption is that consumers who take advantage of such promotions may also purchase additional items during the visit to a retail store, and/or may be more likely to make future visits to the retail store. Traditionally, these promotions are limited to promoting items and/or services of the retailer sponsoring the promotion. Specifically, retailers have traditionally been limited to offering discounts to their own products and/or services in order to entice users to visit their locations.
Some attempts have been made at cross-promoting products and brands of various companies. For example, a fast food chain might contract with a movie studio to cross-promote a particular movie in relation to the chain's fast food products. However, such promotions involve significant advanced planning and agreement, and preparation of physical signage and packaging. Moreover, such cross-promotions are often static, ineffective at driving consumer behavior, and difficult or even impossible to modify and/or evaluate based on real-time performance of the cross-promotion.
Recent advancements in electronic technology, ranging from personal computers to smart phones, now allow for promotions relating to digital content of digital content providers. The promotions for digital content may be delivered to consumers by a variety of means including e-mail, SMS messages, and/or client applications. For example, promotions of digital content include sending users mobile advertisements, such as by displaying a movie trailer to a user before enabling the user to view another video clip of interest. Meanwhile, promotion of retailers has also entered the digital and mobile realm. For example, a mobile device user may now be presented with a banner advertisement, such as for a “brick-and-mortar” retailer, adjacent to electronic content, such as a news article or blog entry, that a user desires to view.
Even when optimized with digital and mobile technologies, these existing techniques have significant limitations. For example, the promotion of digital content, such as a movie trailer or video ad, is often only displayed while the user is instead attempting to access different content of interest. As a result, some users may experience frustration with the promoted digital content, and may be inclined to skip or ignore the digital content, or even begrudge its provider for delaying access to the desired content. Meanwhile, the promotion of a brick-and-mortar store, such as through an ad displayed next to an article, may be too inconspicuous and therefore too ineffective to actually drive the user's contemporaneous or near-term behavior. For example, retailers may be doubtful about the likelihood of a user actually visiting a physical retailer upon seeing its advertisement adjacent to other content. Still further, retailers and third party advertising networks may have no way to determine whether an advertisement led directly, i.e., caused, a user to visit a retail location.
Thus, conventional solutions related to promotions have failed to solve the above-mentioned limitations, and have not provided a solution for promotions that promote both a retailer and digital content in ways that improve the user experience with both retailers and digital content.